Richard ~~ permit me a quotation from my academic discipline. Yours was Law, I believe. Mine was Eng Lit; and I greatly admire within it a book by John Gross called The Rise & Fall Of The English Man Of Letters (1969); a fine critique of the leading lit critics. Of the faults he observes in the work of the once highly influential Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis, Gross writes of "the faintly ridiculous air of having triumphantly demonstrated what has merely been vigorously asserted".

He might have been writing of you.

~M~